Toys

If you’ve bought action figures from Mattel over the past few years, you know that they have had some issues in the manufacturing of your favorite DC Comics characters. But the one that really puzzles me is how often the colors of the final product do not match the paint masters or even the designs as seen in the comics.

Sure, they are the right color, per se. But they are not the right value of that color. And this should be a very simple process: you get a paint master, you match each base color to a Pantone guide, you figure out which parts are molded plastic and which are painted, you send these numbers off to the factory in China, and eventually you should get back some color chips that show the actual plastic that will be used, and what the base plastic looks like painted. At this point you double check the samples against your original Pantone numbers AND the paint master. If they deviant, tweak them and send for new chips. This seems like a pain, but the manufacturing window is long enough that you should be able to handle at least 2-3 rounds of tweaks if necessary.But for some reason, what we see in the prototypes IS NOT what we get.

Case in point is the Superman/Brainiac 2-pack shown at NYCC 2011. The sculpts are great, but the green on the classic Brainiac (seen on the left) is waaaaaay too blue, and waaaay too dark. In all the original comics he was more of an olive shade of green. See the original comic cover at right, and my quick photoshop mockup above of what I think it should be (Note: this cover was Brainiac’s first appearance, and the only one where his boots were pink and not white). I just don’t understand going to the trouble of making these characters and not going all the way to get them right. Amazingly, Mattel actually made his boots and gloves white; their usual process is to treat all white costumes as grey for some reason. It’s a habit that is beyond frustrating, when there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the shade of grey or any purpose in not making the plastic at least off-white. Take a look at a sampling of Mattel DC characters next to a real white Hasbro Stormtrooper figure.
Red Hood, Hawk, Stormtrooper, Power Girl, Captain Cold

And speaking of color, check out the Superman on the right in the pic above, too. If they had to make yet another Superman (albeit one with short hair with the new body) why not adjust the color on him, too, and give us a classic Superman in the shade of blue that the old comics used? The shade of blue that Christopher Reeve wore in the Superman movies? The shade of blue that was used for the Super Powers Superman figure? You get the picture. Fans don’t want to feel screwed with rebuying the same character, so why not do everything you can to make it feel different?

How does something like this happen? I’ll tell you how: it’s the fallacy of memory. It’s when someone looks at an object and their memory tells them that it is correct because it has all of the right symbols, even if the details don’t match up. This happened throughout the licensing process, but it’s something that is incredibly frustrating to me, as at any point in the process any single person could stop it before it is too late to catch. And make no mistake, once it costs money to change something it’s too late. But before that stage, in the planning stage, in the design stage, in the approvals stage…it’s not too late. But we see these mistakes happen over and over, and not just with the colors. And not just Mattel, to be fair! But Mattel definitely is a repeat offender.

Scott McCloud’s explanation of symbols in comics

So why do people rely on their memory, rather than using detailed reference materials to guide them? Well, in the decade I spent in the manufacturing world I found the simplest answer to be that they just don’t realize that their memory isn’t exact. Take a look at the image at the top of this article of the many Superman iterations over the years. If someone not familiar with each version was to be shown these images separately over time, the most common response when asked about the details would be that “it’s Superman” and that they’re all more or less than same. And when you’re talking about the symbols that make up the character “Superman”, they aren’t wrong: they all have his dark hair, they’re all Caucasian, the suit is blue with red trunks, cape, and boots, they all have his “S-Shield” on his chest. But every single “S-Shield” is different, the blues are different values, the reds are too, the hairstyles are different and so on. But if you ignore the details and just get the symbols right, anyone would be able to tell you that it is Superman. And that’s the problem for pretty much any character that you haven’t actually studied: Our memory remembers the symbols, but not necessarily the actual representation. I’m going to be mentioning symbols a lot in this article, so click on the image at right to recognize the importance they play in culture. Note: you can do a lot with just symbols! 1

Getting back to Superman, you can see how getting the symbols right but not the details wasn’t an issue when a toy line might only have ONE Superman figure in it. The symbols were all you needed to worry about for a mom or kid to recognize the character. But as the collector base grew in the past two decades to be the main force pouring the sales, being faithful to the details and the symbols is now paramount. Case in point: Mattel continually recycled the same Superman figure without even a revised paint job, often pairing it with a new or revised character. This is fine for a child buying his first Superman figure, but for long time collectors it forced them into purchasing the same one over and over. Worst still, NOT purchasing it, leading to lost sales and consumer dissatisfaction. The easiest way to rectify the situation would be be to simply repaint the figure, chaining the details to match the different iterations that have existing throughput Superman’s 75 year history. If they could replace the head, that would be all to the better! But even with paint alone, all of the mock-ups below would be achievable. It’s just one more area where a little bit more time spent planning might have extended the life of the line even further.

To be honest, these issues would be minor if these figures were still selling for $6 or $7 each. But with the recession and the price of oil skyrocketing in the past ten years, the cost of one mass retail figure has reached the level that boutique toys are at, but without the commiserate jump in quality. In fact, quality seems to have gone downhill in the same timeframe, no doubt due to trying to keep the same profit margin in the face of decreased sales. It’s even worse when you couple the decline in quality with poor decisions on character choices that were made solely to recoup Mattel’s development costs at the expense of collectors. And that’s the kind of “tone deaf” decision making that makes me hate giving Mattel any money. Unlike the majority of toy companies in the past, most Mattel brand managers come from marketing/copywriting, and I think have almost no judgement for manufacturing at all. QC nightmares notwithstanding, it doesn’t seem like any figures ever get sent back for quality modifications, whether it be color correction, making things more on-model, or just getting details right. That they make collectors pre-buy subscriptions online since the fall of the retail lines is really disappointing as a collector.

Mattel’s Watchmen subscription line

As a case in point, The Watchmen subscription really, really made me angry. Based on the seminal comic series from 1985, collectors have been wanting a comic-based line of merchandise for nearly 30 years. And for what will most likely be the ONLY comic version we will ever get of these characters, Mattel really did a poor job. Again, I understand the constrictions of not having much budget (because Mattel sucks every drop of profit margin out of everything; NECA could do wonders with the same money. But I digress…), so the scale problems, reuse of existing bodies, etc. are all understandable. Less understandable (and this applies to all DC subs) are the expenses put toward packaging instead of the figures, but we know Mattel loves it’s packaging so that’s a losing battle.

Let me get some positives out of the way: at least they all have new heads. And Silk Spectre and Nite Owl are acceptable. The others, though, are total train wrecks when compared with the source material. Looking at the finished products, it comes back to “the fallacy of memory” when these were being created. And likewise, all of the people defending these must be going off their memory of what these characters look like. Because they don’t look like they’re supposed to. The bottom line is that memory is fine for symbols, but for the details you have to study actual reference materials and continuously compare your product to the source. No matter how sharp you think you are, your memory will fool you at every step of the way. Just look at that picture up there: you can easily tell who these characters are, sure. But for $35 each with shipping, these deserved to be a lot better than the knock-offs in dollar stores.

Before I get into specifics, I do want to address the defenders: I’ve had a few people tell me “I don’t have a problem with it” or “it looks fine to me”. I get that. But would you really choose the wrong version over one that was on-model? Because a good sculpt costs the same budget -wise as a bad sculpt. It just takes work on the Brand Manager’s part to make sure it’s right. And again, I think if you’re not used to having a critical eye on these things it’s easy to see the symbols of Rorschach (spots on mask, wearing fedora) and take that to mean that it matches your memory. And Watchmen of all things have a very specific style, by a singular artist (Dave Gibbons) who didn’t really deviate in how he drew them (unlike, say, Jim Lee who changes things from panel to panel). Note: I’m ignoring the recent “Before Watchmen” comic series, as it’s so new and so all over the map it doesn’t really impact most fans’ idea of what these guys look like.

So, Rorschach: again, his scale is off, but body re-use dictated that so it is what it is. But the head is the wrong shape entirely, the hat is completely off, and his facial pattern look to be made up by Mattel. I went through the whole trade and couldn’t find that pattern anywhere. It looks off from what Gibbons designed, and I get the feeling it outlines his nose with the negative space to make the tampo easier. It doesn’t help that each one I’ve seen has the tampo printing slightly off-center and crooked, a QC problem that could have been easily corrected when they got the first samples back from the factory. If you look at the above image, you can really see how incredibly off this is. I made a quick photoshop mockup of the production figure for comparison. As an aside, every place I’ve worked does these when we get pics of sculpts in, to make corrections and demonstrate what is off for the factory to correct. I have a feeling Mattel only does this for engineering, not aesthetics.

Dr. Manhattan has other issues. His head is basically a generic blue bald guy. Gibbons drew him as being an ideal physical from, so his face is quite muscular and angular. The 4H sculpt has softer features, and the geometry is fairly off, especially the eye area. But even so, I can accept what they sculpted more than I can Rorschach. But then Mattel did a tremendously bad job in manufacturing that sculpt; just look at how misshapen that head is! And to cap it off, the eye deco is even farther off than the 4H paint master AND it goes incredibly soft, not even fully covering painted areas. Couple that with the short stature, bad wrist molding (again, compare it to a shot of the 4H sculpt), and skinny neck, and Mattel really messed up what should have been the easiest figure to produce. (I included a shot of the never produced Tim Bruckner sculpt, to show that even that isn’t quite right, although the overall sculpts for those figures were very good in general.)

To me, this is the same thing as movie likenesses, but people get much more bent out of shape of a movie figure is off-model than a comic or animation figure, probably because their memory of Harrison Ford’s features is pretty strong (but unlike an actor their memory of a comic character is mostly based on those pesky symbols, not details. For example, this new movie Spider-Man costume is the first one to get the webs on his face right. But they were always in a similar pattern, so most people didn’t see them as “wrong”. Again, I digress… But it’s all relative. Most consumers would be more upset over a Han Solo or Batman ’66 likeness being off than a Robert Forster Black Hole figure. Or even a Luke vs Wedge figures. We’re just very familiar with certain actors. The new Brad Pitt World War Z figure is no worse than these Watchmen, but boy did everyone hone in on that likeness!

And that’s why it’s such a disappointment to be collecting Mattel toys. Nearly $30 a piece nets us figures that have lower quality than $10 retail figures. And a big chunk of the problems could be corrected for the same cost! Every place I’ve worked, the mantra was you don’t go home until it’s right. Yes, things do happen. But it’s so institutionalized at Mattel, and for the “biggest toy company in the world” it should be the exception, not the rule. But they are so driven by marketing and selling/branding rather than producing quality product it makes me insane. That thinking serves Barbie and Hot Wheels well, where the product lines are built on endless variations of the same thing but it’s murder for unique figures. Everything they do is built around a sales gimmick, not to mention the custom packaging for such un-custom figures. For toys on such a limited budget, I wonder what the cost is to go to an outside artist? Especially since all the artwork is on the back of the package, and it’s all pre-sold, so illustrations do nothing to entice purchase at shelf (which is the point of fun packaging!)

Hasbro’s Star Wars Black 6″ line.

You might think at this point that I’m trying to make an example solely out of Mattel here. But the truth is that when your company gets to a certain size a lot of the attention to detail tends to fall away while looking at the bigger marketing picture. So now it’s Hasbro’s turn in the spotlight, specifically shining on their current “Star Wars Black” 6″ toy line. For this being the “ultimate” Star Wars line and all, it’s pretty tough not to be disappointed in a few of them, starting with R2D2. He’s just terrible, and for a character that is all hard geometry and has multiple perfect CG models floating around (not to mention the actual digital model from Lucasfilm!) it’s just stupid for his sculpt to be off at all. It must be said, however, at a lower price point than Mattel’s figures Hasbro gives us all-new sculpts and plenty of detail work. The intent is clearly there, it’s the execution that is off on some of these. And I’m only focusing on those that fall short; other figures like Boba Fett, Luke X-Wing, Stormtrooper, etc., are excellent.

Brief rundown of what irks me: Most importantly, the head is the wrong shape. It’s too bulbous. The body is slightly too squat. The “face” details have some issues, as the outer “eye” shape is off and too flat and the eye itself is too big and needs to be off center. A lot of the sculpted details are just a bit wrong (see the shapes of the body vents). The blue shapes on his torso are wrong and too small. Let’s take a look at a photo comparison:

Again, at a glance this looks like R2D2 should. But it’s almost like they went completely off of memory on this guy, albeit a decent enough memory. The parts are there, but all just off enough. His shoulders and legs are too thin, and a bit out of proportion. His ankles are way too thin (the side cylinders are too small and in the wrong place). Mine has one leg longer than the other, so he leans slightly (I stole Daniel’s pic for the comparison, so the one below is not mine). His feet are off model, and the inner feet pieces too small. I think that even though the blue parts are probably the correct color, on the actual prop they are metallic and show up much brighter in direct light and IMO could have been cheated to be lighter (or better yet, metallic paint!).

All of these things would be minor nitpicks that I could ignore if there was just a couple. But all together they annoy the heck out of me for something that was digitally sculpted and should have been near perfect. The head shape really bothers me most of all; I could ignore the rest if that was right. Well, that and the fact that he’s crazy small. Let’s take a look at how tall he should be in a still from the end of The Empire Strikes Back:

You can see he’s a pretty good size, about to Luke’s mid-chest. As you can see in the group shot up above, the Hasbro R2D2 barely comes up to Luke’s hips. Fortunately, unlike with the Mattel figures, if you put in a bit of work a lot of the problems can be solved. And even better, Bandai Japan actually is releasing model kits in the same scale as the Hasbro figures that are absolutely perfect (OK, R2’s feet are a bit too big, but still). The Japanese in general tend to put a lot more effort in their consumer products, and these are no different. The main drawback is that they are actual model kits and do take some time putting them together, along with painting them. And they are kind of light, being hollow and all. But the price isn’t too far off from the Hasbro figures. Check out the Hasbro R2 next to the Bandai one and a Bandai C-3P0, who has yet to be produced by Hasbro. (Side note: I painted the R2 kind of dirty as the only shots that he’s totally clean like the Hasbro version are at the very end of Star Wars. But the model comes in a clean state if one is so inclined.)

The figure that needed the most work (so far) is another one that makes you shake your head that they got so wrong: Darth Vader. It’s hard to know where to begin on how bad their Vader is: misshapen helmet/faceplate, overall bad proportions, silver chain attached to his cape, cape itself bad…it’s really a mess. Again, you can easily tell it’s Vader. But boy did they not pay attention to the details on this guy! To be fair, all three original movies (and the one prequel appearance) had different Vader costumes, with slight variations. Ostensibly, the Hasbro one is based of Return of the Jedi as it has a removable helmet and the tunic is tucked into the shoulders. But it as has a silver chain like the Star Wars costume. To fix this figure, I needed a lot more help than just building the Bandai model kit, which had an admittedly strange cape.

What I needed was a pro customizer: my buddy Joshua Izzo! He ended up slicing up an old Epic Force Darth Vader statue thing from the late 1990s and married parts of it to parts of the Hasbro figure. He made the hand interchangeable, fixed the cape, and then sculpted a whole bunch of detail like the tunic onto the figure. Add to that the Bandai kit head and paint the cape chain black and there you go! A close to perfect 6″ scale Darth Vader figure! And it only ended up costing around $60 and countless hours! Ha ha. Thank you, Hasbro. I also touched up the prequel Obi-Wan Kenobi figure with a robe from eBay and a scaled up head from Glassman that puts it in proportion to the body. I then gave it a much better paint job, although the older I get the harder it is to paint these tiny details. All in all, though, my revised figures make me much happier with the line and almost make me feel like I was designing toys again. I’d still rather all the toy companies just stop trusting their memories and start matching reference materials.

Note: I don’t want to have to watermark everything, I think it looks ugly. But if you’re going to repost any of these images or share them, please just give a link back to this page so people can see their original context. Thanks.

I think if you read a few of these articles you start to get a picture of the guy I used to be, specifically a toy designer. I haven’t been one now for nine years at this writing, but the industry still holds a great pull for me. Nothing else I’ve done has been as satisfying as thinking of something that doesn’t exist, and months later walking into any store in any town and holding that object in your hands (even if it didn’t always come out just quite like you thought it would). Don’t get me wrong, I love my current job and have had the opportunity to design many print ads and online videos. But working on a toy line is just a different animal. My one big regret is that I never went to work for any of the big companies like Kenner or Toy Biz or Hasbro, working on a signature line like X-Men or GI Joe.

One area I’ve dabbled in with a bit of freelance work, though, is package design. This is something I only really started doing at the end of my tenure in the toy industry, but the years that followed gave me a much larger education in design theory and composition in general. So now when I do find the time, it’s fun to create packaging and toys for products that never existed, especially trying to match a vintage aesthetic for well-known package designs. Creating custom toys has been around in the mainstream for about 25 years more or less. There are a lot fewer people worrying about custom packaging, probably because it is a different skill (and it is a skill that takes a lot of practice to be good)! There is A LOT of terrible toy packaging out there in the real world these days. Like advertising, the old ways of doing things before the ease of computers meant that you put in a lot of time thinking and reworking designs before they were final. And it showed! In recent times, you are seeing a bit of a reflection back to the nostalgia of the classic toy packaging, with Hasbro reviving it for both Star Wars and GI Joe toys line and Marvel even hiring artist John Tyler Christopher to recreate toys that never existed in that old style look (and he did a phenomenal job, by the way).

Now, some of these are meticulous recreations that took me many days to develop and some of them are basically digital doodles that just took a couple of hours. All of them are meant to be fun. The ease of use computers bring lets me crank these out at a furious pace, a luxury I wouldn’t have if it were still my full time job. I’ll lead off with one of my favorite mock-ups, the one that I spent the most time on by far: the Kenner Super Powers Fortress of Solitude playset.

I made this in 2013 as a wedding present for my good friend Daniel Pickett, uber collector and my partner on the Action Figure Insider website, to match his Tower of Darkness proof sheet. One of the most famous unproduced toys, the actual Tower of Darkness playset went into production just when the Super Powers toy line was cancelled. It was far enough along for packaging to get all the way to the printing proofs being pulled to check for any final flaws, and a few of those proof sheets made their way into the collecting community over the last decade. Daniel was able to snag not only the proof but also some blueprints for the playset and have the whole thing framed up nicely, so I though the perfect wedding gift would be an exact companion piece for a playset that never even was concepted. In a perfect world, I would have learned some 3D software and modeled the Fortress playset for the inset pictures. Instead, I ended up buying a lot of old Star Wars Hoth playsets on eBay and photographing them from every angle, then I chopped it all up in photoshop until I got the result I was looking for. Not perfect, but passable. Last step was to draw the front illustration in a style mimicking that of the original toy packaging, which was an exercise in frustration for a middling artist such as myself. All in all, though, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. Daniel’s bride, Abby, sent me detailed pictures and measurements of his existing proof that I matched and then a colleague at work was nice enough to pull an actual proof from one of our printers, albeit not exactly a vintage Kodak one.

Fortress of Solitude proof sheet lying on a bed

This was more or less following up one of my first package homages, the fabled unproduced 4th Wave of Super Powers figures created for the article that I wrote with James Sawyer in 2004 that first revealed their existence to the world. The great Matt Cauley, Daniel Pickett, and I made a bunch of custom figures to illustrate the article and then I created the packaging for all of them. Lots more frustrating fun trying to draw well enough to compete the illusion, but it worked OK. To this day I see these popping up all over the web. Heck, Mattel even lifted the art I did for the Gold Superman for their homage figure!

I followed these up with more packaging concepts, this time a look at what it might have been like if the Super Powers Collection had followed the Star Wars look instead, using photography of the existing (at the time) movie actors associated with each character. I also threw in some cosplayers for later series; I wrote more about these designs here.

Over the years I made a few full boxed toy mock-ups, too. When Super 7 and Funko released the Kenner Alien line that never originally saw the light of day, I though it would be fun to use an old Kenner Star Wars playset and redress it, as Kenner enjoyed doing for many toy lines. It’s so cost effective to reuse stuff like this that who knows, maybe one day we’ll see this type of thing actually be produced.

Now, obviously I’m copying a good bit of the original design from the Star Wars packaging. But even so, Kenner actually produced two Alien toys before dropping the line over parent complaints: a board game and the infamous 12: Alien figure (click on the image at right for a bigger view of this box). You can see from these packages that a design aesthetic has been established; using monotone set photos and liberal use of the light blue, plus rounded corners on all boxes. Not terribly far off from Star Wars, but enough that it should be it’s own thing. If you look at the packaging that was created for this new line, you can see they ignore a few of these design cues. For fun, I even looked at the two figure card designs they did and made one that would have been more in line with the vintage Kenner stuff. Granted, 99% of the audience for this line has no memory of the original packaging and what Super 7 did is more than fine for the line (I mean, they could have just created their own thing entirely).

That brings up a good point, though: for a lot of the new “retro” lines that are meant to be homages to the toys of the 1970s and 1980s it feels like they are using Star Wars packaging as the one and only template. I’m not going to point any figures and really there isn’t anything at all wrong with that! Star Wars designs were amazingly great, which is why they’ve stood the test of time. It did make me wonder what I would have done, if I was in the position to create new art that is meant to feel old? Luckily, my buddy Jason Lenzi, co-owner of Bif Bang Pow!, is in the retro figure game. And his current lines like Twilight Zone have not only been knocking them out of the park, but also aren’t trying to copy any old designs with the packaging. When Bif Bang Pow! announced they were going to be making figures based on the 1980 Flash Gordon movie, I practically begged Jason to let me play around in that world. And he graciously agreed to humor me! 😉 Now, I knew whatever I came up with wouldn’t be the final design as they have their own very capable design team, but it was fun to play around in my spare time with a lot of design ideas meant to at least open up a few ways to approach the actual packaging. The only direction was to try and work in the iconic poster by Richard Amsel, in case they didn’t use actor likenesses for the printed materials.

The first thing I did was to research actual vintage toy line designs, something I never gave much thought to before past the ones I had tried to reproduce. And I found that the designs were far from being uniform and in fact varied quite a bit in the way they treated each license. What was really surprising to me was that I had expected most of the figures to be packaged on the left hand side of the card, but in fact MORE lines put the figure on the right side. The overall takeaway was that each line tried to distinguish itself from what had come before, probably to stand out more on shelves. This strategy feels very different than the toy lines of today!

Vintage toy packages

Keeping that in mind, I pretty much just went nuts with lots of variations, trying to find an iconic look that felt more old than new. I tried to pick up a lot of cues from the poster and soundtrack as those were some of the only official 1980 merchandise for the movie. Sure, I could go on and on about why I made some of these choices, how I thought using gold accents would be unlike any of the older lines, etc. But instead I’ll just show all the designs below. Final caveat: these are just explorations so there are a lot of rough edges to them (including using different existing figures to mock-up the new ones; the actual toys had not been sculpted when I was playing around). Had I taken any of them to final design I would have gone through a few rounds of refinement with the chosen concept.

Lots of design concepts from me

I have to give a shout-out again to Jason Lenzi for letting me play around. While I ended up too busy at my day job to do much more than what you see here, it was immense fun to dip my feet back into the pool. And the actual final packaging that Bif Bang Pow! is producing turned out great! I’m just happy a few of my touches made it into the mix. I even get a shout-out on the back of the card!

So you can see, I like messing around with this stuff in my free time. I have a few more samples on my DeviantArt page, and I’m sure I’ll have many more showing up there as time rolls on. In fact, just last week I was procrastinating instead of editing a video I was supposed to be working on when I realized that it would be really neat if the new Rocketeer figure from Funko could be just the first figure in a line of classic Pulp Heroes! Electric Tiki did a similar line of statues a few years ago, but I thought it would be neat if the packing reflected the pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s. So of course I spent a few hours batting out some designs. These are probably my roughest ones yet, due to there not being many vintage painted hi-res images floating out there of these characters, and I didn’t put a lot of thought into the text (“Fire of Doom”?!) but I was happy enough with how they turned out. And on that closing note, I’m off to create more stuff!

So I was browsing through Netflix the other night, looking at their range of mediocre to abysmal choices of things I haven’t seen when I stumbled across the newish documentary “The People vs George Lucas”. With no better choices at hand I proceeded to watch it as I wrapped up some late night editing for a project I’m behind on at my “real job”. Let me rephrase that: I tried to watch it. I got about halfway through it before I had to turn it off and put on a Beatles album (FYI: A Hard Day’s Night) to wash away the taste it left in my brain. At its most basic, this was nothing more than what any Star Wars fan has seen thousands of times in every nerd/geek/fanboy forum online since the special editions were released in 1997 up through Revenge of the Sith in 2005. And honestly, I’m kind of tired of going over the same ground over and over and over (Han shot first, Jar Jar sucks, George doesn’t care about us, fans have equal ownership, ad infinitum).

To make it perfectly clear, I didn’t really care for the film. Decently made, but I didn’t see the point to it (even if you tell me at the end they defend George’s right to do whatever he wants with his films…who cares? That point was debated a decade ago). But it did really open my eyes to something I’ve never really thought about before: George absolutely did the right thing when he made the prequels. What did he do right, you ask? Well, going all the way back to Star Wars in 1977, George has continually said that these are kid’s movies. Made for kids. Now, most fans see that as a cop-out. An excuse, a shoddy justification for everything they don’t like about the prequels. And I’m not the first person to point out that he is right, these are kid’s movies. We fell in love with them as children. If you really go back and look at Star Wars today with a clear, cynical grown-up’s eye, you can see how juvenile the first movie was. How black and white. How simplistic.Â And there is nothing wrong with that.

Somewhere down the line, “kid’s movie” became synonymous with “dumbed down crap”, but it wasn’t always that way. E.T. is a “kid’s movie”. Every Disney classic is a “kid’s movie”. You can say that The Wizard of Oz is a kid’s movie. But what we’re really saying is that these are family films- enjoyable for all ages. Now, the prequels are regrettably lacking in finesse. They definitely could have used a rewrite or two and a little better character motivations. But look around: kid’s today still love these movies. They like Jar Jar. They think the Battle Droids are funny. Go read Drew McWeeny’s great series on introducing his sons to the Saga: http://in-my-head.org/2011/11/07/recommended-reading-drew-mcweenys-film-nerd-2-0-star-wars-edition/

George made the right call here. He kept aiming that target in the same place he aimed it in 1977 and 1980 and 1983. And the kids that are enjoying the prequels today (and the Clone Wars, and the video games, and the toys) are going to grow up thinking just as fondly about all of this as we did 20-30 years ago.

I know what you’re thinking. I know, I know. You wanted to see something else. You want Jar Jar gone. You didn’t want silly Battle Droids and endless Jedi fighting. Or C-3PO’s antics. I get it, I really do. But let me point you in the direction of a comparable genre that didn’t take the path that Lucas did. No, this property at some point decided that instead of staying aimed at kids, it would grow up with them. It would evolve and start experimenting with just how far it could push the characters and the existing boundaries. It would get dark, it would get edgy. You know where I’m going with this: it’s comics.

At the same moment that Star Wars was capturing a generation of kids, comics was telling those kids that it was OK to never grown up and leave them behind like the previous generations did. No, once the 1980s hit continuity became king. If you weren’t on board from the beginning it became harder and harder to get on the ride. And every year less and less kids were reading comics. And comics responded by catering to that 80s generation’s every whim in a self-destructing feedback loop. So here we are. Comics exist almost solely as fodder for merchandise and movies and once the 40 and 50 year olds stop buying them the industry is pretty much going to die off (How’s that New 52 treating ya, fans?). Or move onto the web. And collectors alone can’t sustain all the toys or even movies when they are anything but a crowd pleasing, family friendly hit (looking at you, Green Lantern!) But Star Wars? Well, kids will be watching that just like they do the Disney films. Every seven years a new generation will pick it up, and the juggernaut starts up all over again.

Well, that turned out to be a bit longer than I had planned on. It’s been four long years since my last look at the “rejected” concepts that my former co-workers and I came up with when we were working on promotions for the launch of Star Wars: Episode One, The Phantom Menace. And it has easily been the most read article we’ve had here at AFi, bouncing around everywhere from Boing Boing and Gizmodo to the official Star Wars blog and Wired, culminating in an interview with NPR about how it all went down.

But the concepts I showed were only a handful of the ideas that we developed. Admittedly, I cherry-picked the best concepts for that first blog; what I feature down below may cause you to roll your eyes a few times. But let me back up and recap the assignment: I was working for a promotional merchandise company when we got the chance to pitch ideas for a few items that would be made to tie-in to Pepsi’s big Episode One promotions. Until we actually won the job, we could only use things from the original trilogy to concept with. If they liked the idea, we could later try and make it fit with the new movie once they let us see a storyline and artwork. We didn’t have a budget, or even know what the items might be used for (part of the pitch was for us to tell them how to use the merchandise). So we could be making something that cost $.25 to manufacture (say, an on-pack for a Pepsi bottle of can) or we might make something for $300 (a “dealer loader”, that it, a display in store that the store owner would keep or raffle off after the promotion is over).

We came up with hundreds of concepts over about 4-5 rounds of pitching. I and a co-worker, Steve Ross, were the big Star Wars fans of the office, but everyone pitched in. Halfway through the pitch we hired noted comic artists Kerry Gammill and Keith Wilson, so you’ll see that some concept art is definitely better than others. And for all that is here, there is still a good number of concepts that I can’t find the artwork for – in 13 years you tend to lose a few things. As it is, these presentation boards are pretty big and are too big to scan; I had to take photos of each one and clean those up, hence one big reason it’s taken me so long to write this follow up. You can see what the actual boards looked like at right; after we landed the account and created the four life-size characters seen way down below, Lucasfilm was so pleased that we explored making two more characters for the video release: Sebulba and Boss Nass. That exploration didn’t get very far, but I’m not sure if I remember why exactly it was killed. Keep in mind that as I said before, most of these concepts were never seen by Lucasfilm or Pepsi before they got killed at lower levels. So please don’t blame them if your favorite concept never got made.

Anyway, I’m breaking this round up into a few sections, partly because there are some many concepts (and keep in mind this is just a big chunk of what went to final inks and color. We have twice as many rough sketches and written out ideas that didn’t make the cut as we do ones that were presented) and partly to explain each grouping in greater depth. Before I go into the concept I would like to ask one thing: the last blog went around the internet like crazy and keeps coming back every few months as more people discover the designs. But many places that originally grabbed the art didn’t link back here, and now most mentions are unattributed. I have no problem with people sharing these and spreading the word, but I do hate that these are being seen out of context. So if you do grab these or post them somewhere else, please link back to this article. Thanks.

Light Side of the Force/Dark Side of the Force

When we were coming up with all of these concepts pretty much the only thing we had to keep in mind was for everyone to make sure we hit every price point with at least a few ideas, so that we weren’t all concentrating on the big tickets things (which were more fun!). And as guys who immersed themselves in Star Wars, it was less about looking for things to concept about, and more to try and design something that would incent fans, moms, and kids to want to buy some Pepsi to get our merchandise. But occasionally word would come down from the client requesting a specific direction to explore. In the group below, that direction was to show the duality of the light side and dark side of the Force, as embodied by Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader. We knew what Anakin looked like because Lucasfilm has released some pics when Jake Lloyd was cast. But outside of that we had no idea how the character would be used in the film, so we hedged our bets by including a few Luke concepts in there. And as you can see, it was stretch for us to try and tie these two characters together in a physical product. Some of these smaller items that Steve Ross did, like the “Time Chamber” were based on technology from Disney’s Haunted Mansion and would have been really cool to see produced. Again, realize when we developed these in 1998, there was very little Star Wars merchandise out there yet. Even the toy line was barely over two years old. So when you see items like the stacking figures that someone eventually made, don’t point out that these exist, instead ask yourself why doesn’t ALL of these concepts exist by now?

Pepsi Specific Concepts

Knowing that we would most likely either be including these with a six-pack of Pepsi, or making a display around carton of Pepsi in stores, we developed a lot of ideas that were very tied in to Pepsi. After all, Pepsi spent nearly one billion dollars for the license, so they wanted to sell a whole lot of soda. (By the way, this is a pretty common practice. For Episode One, Pizza Hut even created a mascot just so she could interact with the Star Wars promotion.) Some of the ideas were based on the fact that the film would open during the Summer (grills, pool toys, etc.), some just traded off functional items that could be made from iconic images like Vader’s facemask. One note on the prequel characters that start showing up in these concepts: are a couple of rounds of pitches, Lucasfilm allowed us to use whatever we found on the internet about Episode One to concept with. Enough information had leaked by that point that we had a good idea of certain characters and vehicles and places. But our artwork was based on detailed descriptions given to us by friends who had seen some of the work being done at ILM. Those descriptions included things like “Gungans don’t wear clothes” and “Jar Jar has dreadlocks and speaks like a Rastafarian”. So please don’t judge our artistic talent by these goofy designs. There were a few really neat items that didn’t make the cut. My team had previously made the Character Cup Toppers for the Star Wars special edition, so for this round we came up with something new: the straws would be lightsabers or laser blasts coming out of guns, and would follow a track that twisted around the inside of the cup. As you turned the cup, the “blade” would extend with the familiar lightsaber ignition noise from a hidden sound chip. We made some engineering prototypes and they worked quite well (and I even sculpted a few mock-ups one afternoon in my cubicle for a last minute meeting!) but in the end the high cost killed them. And being huge toy collectors, we tried to give “hidden value” for fans of the Kenner toys like the Cantina Dispenser. It was going to be scaled to the action figures, so even if you didn’t use it for your drinks you would have an awesome pre-made diorama (much like the Yoda Pencil Sharpener in the section below this one).

Miscellaneous Concepts

Like the last blog, this group is just a whole bunch of random ideas thrown up against the wall to see what sticks. This project was both fun and frustrating. We had a very limited time to make…whatever is was we were going to make. We were working on many different projects at the same time all this was going on, and we had no clear idea of what the client wanted (mainly because the client wasn’t sure, either). So be kind to some of these pieces. The fabric booksock is not our finest hour.

What Was Made

We ended up producing one big idea: the life-size characters that showed up in many stores as part of a Pepsi display, and lots of little ideas. Although some of these were fairly expensive high-end items, like the leather bomber jacket with the Naboo/Federation fighter squadron embroidered patches. The lightsaber flashlight was a great replica of Qui-Gon’s saber, and the first lightsaber made with a belt clip (the resin prototype is shown below; I can’t find a picture of the actual item that was made). The bottle toppers were also finger puppets.

So that’s it for this round, and that is the end of the Pepsi concepts! I have at least two more blogs detailing what it took to actually get everything produced. I’m really hoping to get both finished before San Diego Comic Con this year! And huge props go out to my former buddies in the trenches, who came up with all this stuff and fought to get it made: Steve Ross, Mike Hawkins, Kerry Gammill, Keith Wilson, Laurie Brownlow, Mark Mears, Mike Flecker, Keith DeWaters, Mike Dethloff and Brad Weston.

So these days it seems like no one is totally happy with the companies that are making mainstream toys. If it’s not the price hikes, it’s the selection. Or the quality control. Or the shoulders are backward. Sure, sure, these problems are all annoying, especially in light of the price you pay for the toys these days.

At the risk of sounding like every other “apologist jackass” out there, sometimes these things really are out of the control of the people in charge of shepherding the line from concept to manufacturing to store shelves. Things like parts missing from packages, or bad paint jobs, or bent legs are all factory related issues. And no matter how many samples you may check and sign off on at the end of the day you really have no idea how well the factory is going to follow your master samples or the checklists you devise to make sure all runs smoothly. Even having someone stationed in China doesn’t fix everything. When I was designing toys, I worked for small enough companies that I was often the one overseeing the process through the factory, even staying in China from time to time. Mistakes happen on every job, it’s just part of the process.

But the factory stuff at least gives you the opportunity to fix things. If you catch it early, most times collectors never have any idea about the daily problems that crop up. And for large runs, you can always make running changes to try and fix it as early as possible. But some of the things that collectors complain about are simply out of your control. And nowhere in the process is that lack of control more frustrating than in dealing with Licensors (or clients).Â These people are the ones with the ultimate control of their properties, and they are the ones who dictate what you can and cannot make. Even more frustrating is that most of the time the people in charge of licensing are not creators or artists, but simply account people working their way up the ladder and happen to have stopped there. They don’t know the property, they don’t watch the cartoons/movies/tv shows. No, what they have is a style guide, which to them is THE BIBLE.

No joke! That style guide went through a long, complicated process designed to take thinking out of the equation. The licensing rep can be very pleasant, and fun to work with, and very smart, but if you want to deviate from the style guide or the approved corporate branding, then you have huge problems. Because they do not want to “color outside the lines”, because they a.) have no power to make those decisions, and b.) don’t know what they can and can’t do since they didn’t create the property. This whole drawn out preface leads me to what are arguably two of the biggest complaints with some toy lines out there today: character choice, and color choices.

But occasionally, a fun geek property would drop in our laps. And the year after it debuted, we got Teen Titans (Short note: we lobbied for the TT license probably a year before it debuted, but the execs thought it wouldn’t be a big hit. When we finally made the the price had gone up, of course). Being very aware of the Bandai line, we looked at ways that collectors might be able to integrate what we make with that toy line. Keep in mind, whatever we made had to be fun for little kids first and foremost. So we churned out the usual 100 or so concepts, took about 25 to color, and proceed to weed down to the final 4-5 toys from there. Now, anyone who collected the Teen Titans Bandai toys are sure to remember one fact about the line: They didn’t make the line 3.5″ SCALE, they made all the figures 3.5″ period. I’m not sure why; sometimes this is a function of contracts in splitting the license. In any case, those that wanted a Cyborg figure to be in scale with the rest of the TT kids were out of luck. Instead of the relative sizes matching the picture up above, this is what they got:

So that was a problem. Wendy’s to the rescue! One of the concepts we pushed and pushed was a Cyborg figure that was perfectly in scale with the Bandai Titans. I knew that collectors would buy them up, AFi could have publicized the scale unity, win win all around. Now, since Bandai had the license for action figures, we couldn’t make a perfect representation. We could make a “figurine”, though. And after a bit of back and forth, we came to the agreement that as long as it had a base it would be considered a figurine, and not a figure. We would just make the base removable. 😉 Keep in mind that we only had less than $.50 to play with, so the only articulation would be in the arms, which would pump with the press of a button on his back. But standing on the shelf the idea was for him to fit in perfectly with the Teen Titans figures. The concept got pretty far down the chain, ending up in the near final mix, going all the way through costing and into engineering. But unfortunately, the licensor felt that Cyborg just wasn’t leading man material. It was decreed that we could use the whole group on toys, but any individual character could only be Robin, who parents would recognize. So adios, Cyborg.

That wasn’t the end of our problems, though. And it brings me to the second complaint fans make: color choices. Specifically, this was a huge problem throughout the life of the Justice League Unlimited line.Â And it has a very simple answer. The WB style guides have color callouts, showing the Pantone number for each color used on every character and prop. It also has specified callouts for the paint chips and plastic used for merchandise. And here is where we get back to the licensing reps not wanting to deviate from the guide. The callouts for the plastics only use one color for each section of a character’s costume, since you don’t paint shadows and highlights on a toy like you would on a drawing. But the guide chose the shadow color as the base color for the plastic! So all of the colors are too dark. To make matters worse, one of the first steps you do is send the factory the Pantone numbers, they send back paint chips that match, and the studio approves those paint chip so the paint/plastic can be ordered. This process happens every month with many different licensors, so it’s just a well-oiled process. In general, why would you ever question the style guide or licensor that they might be wrong BEFORE you see any of the toys? The answer is, you don’t. You’re busy with all the other projects on your plate.

So when we couldn’t make Cyborg, we went ahead with a Robin spinner (that had a really neat 3D Teen Titans logo with a magnet inside!) You push the sculpted logo near the figure (which also has a magnet inside) and it’s pushed away as it spins wildly. Fun. Everything went according to plan until we received the final painted sample. At that point he ceased to be referred to internally as “Robin” and instead became “Sunburn Robin” to everyone involved.

All of his colors were way too dark. The yellow of his costume could barely be seen against the red. So we had a problem. To compound matters, the figure was 100% approved. You don’t mess with anything that is approved, as approvals are always a pain. And look at this from an exec’s point of view: the studio is happy, the client is happy, the toy will be gone in a month anyway. Why open a can of worms just to have to pay for more paint, delay production a bit, and possibly cause bad blood with the licensor by giving them more paperwork? To their credit, after we argued a bit and brought in the Bandai Robin to prove our point we were able to go back to the licensor to request a new color palette (props to lead creatives Greg Leibert & Brian Sandlin for really fighting that fight). And that’s when things got weird. For whatever reason, WB was convinced that the colors were too dark. But they said we could only change two of them. I have no idea why. Maybe that was the cost limit for new paint? Who knows. We ended up choosing the go bright with the yellow and skin colors as those were the ones that really stood out. But it still was not “right”. (And we couldn’t afford the paint apps to make the inside of the cape yellow or his grey boot tips, in case you were wondering).

And if it had been an action figure, no collector would have said “Well, they got some of the colors right, I’ll give them that”. They would have screamed bloody murder that the other colors were wrong. And I can’t argue that. But no one saw the fight to get it to that point. The rest was simply out of our control.

As the years have gone by and I’ve gotten older (and wiser?) I’ve come to notice that every time one of our “distinguished men of AFi” have posted pictures of their past childhood holiday toy pictures that something has been missing from my life: namely, and similar pictures of MY childhood Christmases filled with toys. For that matter, I really never had any pictures of much of my childhood, period, outside of the typical family portraits. Or so I thought. Last year while home for the holidays I made an off-hand remark to that effect to my mother, who then asked why didn’t I look in all the boxes of slides we had stored upstairs. Turns out that my parents DID take a tremendous amount of pictures, only they were almost all slide film and then put away once we stopped gathering around the ol’ Kodak Carousel. Since I was curious as to what slides we had, I took it upon myself to scan them all and convert them into nice digital files.

Well, over 6000 slides, 12 months, and many hundreds of hours later, I now know what is on all of those slides (and might I add they date back into the 1950s, well before I was around). And I still have around 2000 more slides to scan…unless they find even more boxes, which is a very distinct possibility. But within all of those pictures, I did find a number of great shots of what I received for Christmases past. I haven’t gotten into the 1980s yet, and if you had asked me before I scanned them what toys I received, I would have told you that I mainly got cars & planes, model trains, and a toy drum set until 1978. At that point my life was overtaken by Star Wars, (I even made my own xmas stocking shaped like Boba Fett’s leg, seen at right!) and I can’t really remember owning any other toys until I started collecting in earnest in college (well after throwing away everything I had in childhood).

What I wouldn’t have said I owed was any GI Joe toys. I do remember having the awesome Sea Wolf sub, and maybe a Joe with Kung-Fu grip, but I would have stopped there and said I didn’t play with the Joes. I would have been a damn liar. Turns out there is photographic proof that I indeed played with Joes. In fact, I owned a number of Adventure Team Joes, playsets and vehicles. And now that I’ve seen all these sets in their awesome packaging, I really, really wish I still owned them! Ah well. Take a look at the coolness below, along with some other early 1970s toys I wish I still owned, and a few other shots for a geeky childhood. I do still own that great Mickey Mouse head bank, along now with the other 3 characters they made. And as much as I claim to not like the Muppets, I apparently liked them enough back then to have a big-ass poster of Kermit and Fozzie on my wall. Anyway, enjoy the nostalgia!

Five years ago, shortly before I left California for Texas, Julius Marx and I paid a visit to the studio of a truly fantastic artist, sculptor, and all-around great guy: Rubén Procopio. If you don’t recognize the name you surely will recognize his work (and if you don’t recognize the name, shame on you!).

First, Rubén has recently written an awesome book (with Tim Bruckner and Zach Oat), Pop Sculpture, that anyone who is interested in sculpture should read. If you want to be a sculptor, I would even say stop reading this blog right now and go buy a copy. It’s a really, really informative look at the whole process of creating action figures and statues based on popular media properties.

Second, Rubén has been involved in so many areas that are near and dear to my heart that I alternate being in awe of him and being bitterly jealous. 😉 Just kidding! But seriously, he started at the Disney Studios in the 1970s, following in the footsteps of his father, Adolfo Procopio (and if you’ve ever been to Disneyland or Disneyworld, you’ve seen a lot of Adolfo spectacular sculpts), and was mentored by the fabled Nine Old Men (Eric Larson in particular) as he rose through the ranks of Disney Animation.

In the 1980s, he was a key figure in bringing back the art of using animation maquettes to guide the artists, creating some of the first ones for The Great Mouse Detective, Oliver & Company, and The Little Mermaid. While at Disney, Rubén was also being mentored by Alex Toth, whose comic art style can be seen influencing Rubén’s take on The Phantom and Zorro. Since leaving Disney as an animation supervisor, Rubén has created sculptures for Walt Disney Consumer Products, Walt Disney Classics Collection, Bowen Designs, Sideshow Collectibles, and DC Direct through his Masked Avengers Studio. Most notably, he’s produced a wide array of items for his former Disney colleague Tracy Mark Lee at Electric Tiki. Rubén was further able to honor his long time love for pulp heroes by spearheading the Classic Heroes Collection, featuring everyone from Dick Tracy and Doc Savage to The Rocketeer and Hellboy. Even Lassie got some love! I can’t tell you how much I love this series; the only thing that would have made me happier is if they were able to make a figure line that looked just like these sculpts, only articulated.

Rubén was gracious enough to let me take pictures of his workspace and some of his past projects to share. The artistry on display here just blows my mind, especially considering his medium of choice is Super Sculpey! So check out the pics below (click on a picture to enlarge and get commentary below each shot) and then leave some comments! And go check out his own blog for lots more gems!

That’s right, true believer! Mattel’s toy line of Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars lives again! And it’s a crazy tale that will Thunderball you over with its twists and turns. But first, let me lay down a little background on you for those not already in the know:

It all started with a phone call. In 1983 Mattel, the largest toy company in the world, contacted Marvel Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter. Having recently lost their bid to make toys of the DC Comics characters to Kenner Toys, Mattel immediately went to Marvel for the chance at a competing toy line. Shooter was intrigued by the talks, but Mattel did have one condition: they wanted a big event to base the toys on in lieu of any TV or film support. The specifics weren’t important as long as it was called “Secret Wars”- two words that Mattel had found tested well with adolescent boys. And so the tongue-twisting “Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars” was born. Although Mattel had input into the mini-series’ direction and Marvel did everything they could to facilitate new toys (creating new characters, changing existing character’s costumes, and highlighting vehicles and play environments), Mattel ultimately used very little specifics from the Secret Wars comics itself.

Roger Sweet, the creator of Masters of the Universe at Mattel, was responsible for oversight of the new line. “I had been put in charge of managing the design creation of the 1983 He-Man / Masters Of The Universe line, and continued to do so through the 1987 line.”, said Roger. “But, in about 1984, I was also given responsibility for managing the design creation of the Marvel Secret Wars line. Mattel had gone to Marvel in the hope of picking up the Marvel line, and did so. Previously, Mattel had been to DC Comics in the hope of acquiring the DC license. But, Mattel lost out to Kenner. By Mattel Marketing and upper management, the Marvel Secret Wars line was viewed as a “flanker brand” to Masters. In other words, it was considered as a secondary brand to pick up additional male action sales for Mattel, but while cutting little into Masters’ sales. That is why the Marvel figures were designed smaller and far less muscular than the Masters figures.” So these figures were intentionally “dumbed down” to not only save production costs, but to literally be a lesser product to not compete with MOTU, but still pick up subsidiary sales, much like Marvel’s SuperHeroSquad does today (of course, we still see this theory in effect today at Mattel, with lines like JLU). This also explains how a smaller company like Kenner got the DC license instead of Mattel; because they were willing to put more money and effort into it.

Secret Wars figures were articulated only at the shoulders, hips and neck and had no special “action feature” like Kenner’s Super Powers or Mattel’s own Masters of the Universe. Most of the figures shared one of 3 basic bodies, with only minimal custom detail tooled for each character. This also meant that there would be no characters with unusual bodies that couldn’t be reused or that were oversized and would need unique packaging. Mr. Sweet explains how the direction of the line was decided: “I was quite familiar with the Marvel Comics characters. I had grown up with some of them, and had read about them in the Marvel comics. Marvel provided very little actual support, but would have if Mattel had needed it. My design group and Marketing handled the selection of the Marvel figures to go into the Mattel Marvel line, and the creation of the other product like vehicles and playsets.”

The first series to hit store shelves featured the customary stalwart Marvel characters along with some new fan favorites getting toys for the very first time. Roger Sweet’s design group, “along with Marketing, selected the figures. They were selected largely because they were the main known Marvel good and bad guys at that time, or appealed to someone at Mattel”. It’s safe to say that colorful characters and ones that were easy to produce also played a factor in figure selection.

Series 2 hit shelves in early 1985, but by this time the line was already ceasing production overseas. Whereas the first series featured characters that all played a big role in the Secret Wars comic, nearly all of the characters in this next series didn’t appear in Secret Wars at all! Even during production then, some concepts never made it to shelves. “There was one vehicle that I created and designed that was very neat. And, I commissioned an outside designer to do a beautiful full-color styled illustration of it. The vehicle had one figure sitting inside a cockpit and another figure standing on the back manning a machine gun. But the vehicle later was deleted in the Mattel visual design department and replaced by a much less appealing vehicle of another type.” laments Mr. Sweet.

Series 2- Falcon, Hobgoblin, Baron Zemo, Black Spider-Man, Daredevil

Unfortunately the toys were not a giant hit on the scale of He-Man and his pals and within just 2 years of launch, the Secret Wars line was already in clearance bins at toy store around the country. The cancellation of the line was so abrupt that three figures for the third series were already in production. Rather than destroy these toys, they were released in Europe only as there were not enough of them to distribute to all the American markets.

European Figures- Constrictor, Electro, Iceman

Once again, the only three new characters never appeared in the Secret Wars comics, and in fact they were not even very well known or popular in the comics of the day. The cost cutting could readily be seen by this point: outside of new heads, each of their bodies are recycled from earlier figures with no added details. Like much of the other characters, this would be the first time any of them had been made into toys. Unlike the other series, these three are by far the rarest pieces in the entire line, and even at the time of their release were hard to find if you didn’t like in Europe.

And that’s where it ended, as a pale shadow of other contemporary lines, yet the only glimpse fans had of their favorite characters in plastic during Marvel’s heyday. But was it really the end?

Well, apparently Mattel had further plans for these stalwart heroes and heroines. Yep, now it can be told: there were TWO more assortments planned and it seems that they were a good ways into production when the line was cancelled. We’ve done a little detective work coupled with the find of some artwork for those final waves to bring you the whole story. The artwork in and of itself is quite a find. This isn’t concept art, but actual production art to be used for one of the most overlooked items in the Secret Wars saga: the lenticular shields used by all of the figures! Each figure came with four lenticular inserts- one in the shield and three in a baggie. The inserts showed unique scenes on front and back pertaining to each character; some of them showed secret identities, some showed a demonstration of their powers, and most showed them in battle with other characters that had figures so kids could act out the mayhem on their own.

And that fact is key to figuring out what was going to be made: no shield produced featured characters that were NOT a part of the Secret Wars line. So looking at the artwork created for the unmade figures’ shields we can see that the characters that were previously unknown are: Mr. Fantastic, the Abomination, Annihilus, Thunderball, and Dazzler! Yes, as crazy as it seems (and really, this entire line-up is pretty crazy) the first female figure that the toy line was going to have was not Phoenix, not Invisible Girl, not Scarlet Witch, but Dazzler. Oh kay.

But maybe she wasn’t going to be the first. There were two more characters featured on the shield artwork that hadn’t been seen before, but didn’t have full set of art themselves: the Hulk and Mystique. And this is really the final piece of the puzzle, because some of the existing characters seen on the artwork include Iceman, Electro, and Constrictor: the 3 “European” Secret Wars figures. If we assume that Mattel’s plans going forward were to mirror the second wave, and offer 5 new characters with some re-released older figures in each assortment, then it seems apparent that wave three would have actually been Electro, Iceman, Constrictor, The Hulk, and Mystique. The Hulk has long been reported by multiple sources to have been sculpted, and Mystique would have made a very striking, colorful figure. Especially since the prevailing mantra of the time was “girls don’t sell” in the action figure world, having an “alien” looking girl just might help counter that wisdom. It also makes sense why only three of them were released to Europe: these figures only needed tooling for new heads, and their bodies were straight repaints of earlier figures and therefore were cheap to produce and recoup costs on what was already in production. But tooling new bodies like the Hulk or Mystique would cost much more, giving them no chance to make their money back unless they were released wide in a big market like the U.S.

The fourth wave probably wasn’t that far into production, with most of the artwork not even having been inked yet, let alone colored and formatted for lenticular prints (and that also explains why there is finished artwork so far out; the lenticular process took more time than normal printing schedules). But we can see how Dazzler would have been meant reuse the Mystique body, Abomination the Hulk body, and the rest reusing and repainting existing bodies with maybe new wings for Annihilus and a new neck or arms for Mr. Fantastic. (UPDATE: it is now known that at least the Hulk and Abomination WERE sculpted and reside in the Mattel’s vaults! Hopefully one day we’ll see pictures of these long-awaited figures.)

Of course, we haven’t talked yet about WHO exactly drew this artwork. Earlier series had art by comic pros such as Mike Zeck and Bob Layton. But Mattel also had their own stable of artists that they used for lines like Masters of the Universe. Some of them were established comic artists, too, like the great Mike Sekowsky, who drew some alternate Mr. Fantastic pieces, and Pete Von Sholly, who drew the Thunderball artwork. But the majority of these pieces were handed over to a young artist who was then doing a bang-up job on the MOTU mini-comics. An artist who would go on to establish himself as having not only a distinctive art style, but also a unique voice that would remake how people saw superhero animation. Yes, these images would have been the first professional published superhero art by Bruce Timm, who confirmed it for us himself. “Holy crap, I’d completely forgotten about that stuff “, said Bruce. “It was so long ago, my memory’s pretty hazy, but these were the only pieces I did for the Secret Wars line — and yes, I guess this was my first “professional” spandex/superhero art”. Another artist who worked on the line remembers that “the line was cancelled while they were working on it, but [I] really don’t have more memory of it. Bruce came in at the end, which is why I don’t believe any of his were ever produced.” According to him, they were specifically commissioned by Mattel to create this final art. His notes on the last two assignments character assignments reads: Abomination, Dazzler, Mr. Fantastic, Annihilus, Hulk, Glider (1st of two), and Mystique, Vision, Thunderball. Color was never produced for these two batches, so they got a kill fee for that aspect. This is the only mention of the Vision, as no artwork involving him has shown up anywhere (it is possible that the art for the Vision was never started,with the cancellation of the line happening before that point and much of the artwork in pencil only).

Hero Shields

Dazzler

Dazzler vs Annihilus

Dazzler vs Constrictor

Dazzler vs Villains

Dazzler vs bars

Dazzler vs Abomination

Mr Fantastic

Mr Fantastic vs Abomination

Mr Fantastic vs Doom Roller

Mr Fantastic vs Electro

Mr Fantastic vs Villains

Mr Fantastic vs Abomination (Sekowsky

Mr Fantastic vs Hobgoblin (Sekowsky)

Mr Fantastic (Sekowsky)

Villain Shields

The Abomination

Abomination vs building

Abomination vs Captain America

Abomination vs wall

Abomination vs Hulk

Abomination vs Wolverine

Annihilus

Annihilus vs Hulk

Annihilus vs Base

Annihilus vs Captain America

Annihilus vs Dazzler

Annihilus vs Daredevil

Annihilus vs Spider-Man

Thunderball

Thunderball vs bike

Thunderball vs Captain America

Thunderball vs helicopter

Thunderball vs Spider-Man

Thunderball vs Iceman

Thunderball vs wall

Bruce didn’t just draw the figure’s shields, though. Also included in his artwork were some new gliders (like the Doom Star and Star Dart) and “Battle Board” art that appears to be tied to new “mini-rig” type vehicles that probably would have been packaged with a figure or two for a deluxe package.

Battle Boards

Iron Man

Captain America

Constrictor

Daredevil

Mystique

Spider-Man

Electro

Dr. Doom

Wolverine

Gliders

Mystique

Spider-Man

With this great new look at what might have been we can only step back and marvel at how amazing, fantastically bizarre this toy line really was. To this day we do not yet have figures of Baron Zemo 2 and Dazzler, and Constrictor is only just showing up now. But the likelihood of turning up actual sculpts of the unproduced toys seems to be pretty slim. According to a source “in the know”, there is nothing in the Mattel archives concerning Secret Wars. Apparently Mattel kept terrible records back then and anything pre-1995 is kind of a lost cause.

There is a copy of Dr. Doom’s original weapon (?) that was not included with the figure in one of their display cases. And the rumors swirl that Hulk and The Thing were sculpted. But unless the prototypes were still on someone’s desk who has worked there all these years, or in a retired designer’s drawer hidden away from the world, it is doubtful we’ll ever know just what could have been had Mattel stuck it out for just one more year back in 1985.

When I first started collecting toys back around 1990 I would run into other collectors sporadically (this being in the dark days before the internet collecting community at large had coalesced around USENET, for the most part). One way I would know that they were die-hard toy hunters was that they had had “The Dream”. Usually this centered around Star Wars, but every collector who I talked with had it at one point or another after they had become totally immersed in hunting down old toys.

Make no mistake, The Dream never involved new toys. It always started with you being in a store (most likely a store that no longer existed, frequently a department store that still had a toy section) and as you wander through the store you find all the toys you wish were still there brand new on the shelves. And tons of them: the first 12-back Star Wars figures, all MOC. The original run of Master of the Universe. The 3rd wave of Super Powers. Maybe a Bionic Bigfoot, or Micronauts vehicle peeking around the endcap. And even better, toys that were never made! A vintage Tie Bomber! A Bantha playset! A whole rack of He-Ro figures!

Well, I didn’t have that dream often, but I did have it. Up until about 12 years ago, that is. And then it went away, probably because nothing was hard to find anymore thanks to eBay, and everything you wish had been made in the 1970s was now being made in the present day. But last night, I had the dream again! Sorta…

I dreamt that I was buying Marvel Universe figures. And not just the ones I’ve been passing up, but ones we haven’t seen yet, like the Lizard, and Juggernaut, and Wendigo. And even better, there were a lot of DC characters there too: Superman, Joker, Killer Croc, Blue Devil. All sculpted just like the MU figures. Now, I don’t know what this means. I’m in the process of dumping most of my toy collection for good, and I surely don’t need anything new outside of DCUC to take my money these days.

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t do some mental calculations about just how much it would cost to catch up on the MU figures as soon as I woke up…

Update – 2014: Of course, now I own about 85% of all the Marvel Universe figures! Go here to check out just how many of these things have been made so far at Daniel Lynch’s awesome MU checklist! The packaging alone on this line is just amazing, with top-level Marvel artists creating custom illustrations specifically for the toy line. You just don’t see that any more! Here’s who did what:

So I started this year vowing to cut back on the toy buying. In fact, I had quit buying almost all together, thanks in part to it being so hard to find Mattel’s latest offerings and the fact that Hasbro has delayed the next batch of Marvel Legends for so long. In any case I wasn’t planning on starting any new lines. And then I went to see this:

And within a few days I had bought everything seen in the picture above!

Now, don’t get me wrong; I love Indiana Jones. It’s just that I hadn’t planned collecting any of these, really, especially after dropping the Star Wars line in 2001. I was narrowing the collection down to just the DCUC line and a few Marvel Legends that filled gaps in my nostalgia collection. Mainly because as I get older I care less about owning toys, and also the small fact of having 60+ boxes of action figures sealed away that i will probably never open or display every again.

But once I saw the film and then saw all the toys on sale the next day something deep within me snapped and before I knew it I was carrying them to the register and buying a good chunk of what was out there. It didn’t help that I had ordered the “Making of” book and the soundtrack the morning before I saw the film (the book is good, but not anywhere near as good as the great Making of Star Wars book they put out last year. Much of the info here is from the documentaries that were on the DVDs!)

I did plan on buying one or two figures and maybe the truck vehicle to repaint with a more detailed paint job. As it is, the deco work is one thing that is really bad about these figure. Hasbro claims to be fixing it, so we’ll see. Having come this far, I’ll at least pick up the main characters from Temple of Doom and Last Crusade, along with whatever major characters are left over from Raiders. But I don’t need 20 Indys, Mutts, or army builders. Maybe I’ll just paint them and put them all on eBay next year, I dunno. In any case, I already broke down and got the great Sideshow 12″ figure when it went on sale to go next to my Medicom Rocketeer and assortedreal lifecharacters, Generals, and Presidents. And now I have the new figures displayed on both sides of the vintage Kenner ones from 1982.

So what did I think of the movie? Well, the short answer is that I enjoyed it a lot while i was watching it. I found it pretty entertaining and I didn’t get bored. My parents happened to be visiting me that week, so I took them on opening day, and being children of the 1950s they enjoyed it a lot. And that made me like it probably more than I would have otherwise, having seen Raiders of the Lost Ark on opening weekend with my Mom 27 years ago.

But it could have been better. It is better than Temple of Doom (in my opinion), but suffers from the same problem: a good story, good set pieces, good action that is hampered by an inelegant script. Say what you will about Last Crusade, but the dialogue and character motivations are solid. Yes, I know some people don’t like the revised characterizations of Indy and Marcus Brody from Raiders, but within that story everyone behaves as logically as you could expect them to for a film of this type. For that matter, this is the same problem that the Star Wars prequels have. I can only imagine this is mainly a “George Lucas need an editor” issue. He’s a fantastic storyteller, but a pretty bad with dialogue and motivation.

So here are my thoughts about the film. SPOILERS AHEAD!!! Keep in mind that I did enjoy it quite a bit, and felt that Spielberg really nailed the era it is set in, and the overall look of the film, which fits in very well as a “lost” 80s movie in terms of pacing, editing, and lighting. I really loved all of the 50s elements: the hot rods, greasers, atomic age paranoia, and even the sci-fi angle. I didn’t mind the fact that the artifact in this film was extraterrestrial, and really liked Lucas’ idea of following the 50s “saucer men” conventions instead of the 30s serial ones. The music fit perfectly, with a hint of theremin even. Unfortunately, 50s sci-fi music was very atmospheric and not much for stirring character themes like the 30s scores of Rozsa and Steiner so there are very few memorable new cues from John Williams this go-round. I liked Shia’s character and acting well enough and of course loved that they brought back Marion instead of trying to introduce a new “girl” that would have to be either in Indy’s age range (icky?) or much younger (creepy!).

What I didn’t like are all the things that made it seem not like an Indiana Jones film. For one thing, all of the other films open with a segment that feels like it is the ending of a movie that we haven’t seen. This one picks up in the middle of an ongoing story all right, but is more or less a prologue to the movie we’re about to see. It also sets up a great “commie witchhunt” angle that is then completely dropped! Almost nothing that happens in the prologue pays off in a meaningful way later. In the first draft of the script (Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars) written waaay back in 1994 this sequence took place near the middle of the film. I would have rather seen a prologue that has nothing to do with this film, start with the Yale sequence and then have the Soviets grab Indy and Mutt and take them to Hanger 51. Everything else could proceed from there, with the FBI goons basically blacklisting him at that point.

It would also break up the film a bit more. One thing that bothered me even as I was watching was that not only did everything see to happen very easily without much hassle, but they traveled in a fairly linear manner: Mutt gives Indy a letter about South America, Indy figures out a code the Soviets couldn’t crack IN SECONDS they travel to Peru where he figures out where to go IN SECONDS they go to graveyard that doesn’t seem to be in the least bit hidden, are attacked by useless guardians (who are these guys?), find the skull immediately, and it continues like this for the rest of the film. It would at least seem a bit more challenging if they had traveled somewhere other than South America to find the conquistador, and THEN went to Peru. Of course, Temple of Doom suffers from this very same thing- too long in one place.

Speaking of plotlines that got dropped, why make such a big deal about Mutt bringing his bike to South America with them, and then never mentioning it again? Why bring up the human looking Mitchell-Hedges Crystal Skulls if they have no relevance to the plot or the alien skulls? Why do the Soviets get the alien from Hanger 51, yet not try to use its skull? How is it connected to the Akator aliens? Where does it go? What connection do the graveyard warriors have to Akator? What are they guarding, if not the skull? If they are guarding the skull, why? Again, too many things are brought up in the script with no payoff later. We never even see Indy and Marion really reunite, or Marion and Mutt reunite, it’s all like a sitcom reunion. And shouldn’t Oxley and Indy have some sort of reconciliation once Ox’s mind is right? Seriously, why does David Keopp have any kind of reputation? Frank Darabont’s unused draft had better action and motivations, but it wasn’t perfect, either.

I’ll skip complaining about the CGI, except to say my biggest objection to it was that it removed any feeling of danger and made a lot of locations feel like soundstages. In the first film, I was nervous about Indy hanging on to a truck. In the second, I marveled at him being on a rope bridge over a humongous chasm. In the third, he’s on a horse vs a tank. All of these felt like he was actually doing these things. In this film he goes over 3 giant waterfalls and is a little bit wet. No one in the CAR is even slightly sore! They drove off a cliff to get there! C’mon! The ants weren’t particularly scary, but it was a nice nod back to another 50s film, the Naked Jungle. I’d have rather George included a river boat sequence with crocodiles like the ones in the earlier “Saucer Men” draft and even the rejected script for the 3rd movie, Indiana Jones and the Monkey King. I guess Lucas just wanted to let Disney own that concept in their upcoming Jungle Cruise film.

I talked a bit earlier at how I liked Mutt and Marion. I thought that they, and Indy, and even Irina were fleshed out well enough for this film. Marion needed more to do, but all of them had nice moments and they felt like consistent characters. The rest of the Soviets were a waste (and why cast real Russian actors when only one of them had anything to do outside of shout and run?) Speaking of a waste, what is the point of Ray Winstone’s character at all? He doesn’t really effect the plot at all, and is given very little to do. And I understand that John Hurt is supposed to be akin to Treasure Island’s crazy Ben Gunn, but it would have been nice to see him have some resonance on any level with the audience. Even the characters in the film treat him more or last as a dog they found and are taking along for the ride.

And honestly, did we need all these great big-name actors? Indiana Jones is supposed to be a down & dirty serial, not an Oscar contender. Outside of Sean Connery (which was an in-joke that made sense) the other films didn’t have any acting heavyweights involved. Sure, they had great character actors, but not of the caliber of Cate Blanchett, Ray Winstone, Jim Broadbent, and John Hurt. Even Shia starred in freaking Transformers! I think the story would have been much better served without so many recognizable faces on the screen every five minutes. Even minor roles had me saying “hey look, it’s Charles Widmore from LOST! And the janitor from Scrubs!” and I don’t even watch much TV. This same thing was a detriment to the Star Wars prequels. Although I don’t want Lucas casting the parts if it gives us the Indiana Jones equivalent of Jake Lloyd and Hayden Christenson. *shudder*.

Anyway, I could go on and on, but I did enjoy it pretty well for what it is and am looking forward to seeing it again on DVD. Unlike Star Wars, which is one long story, the Indiana Jones films are relatively self contained and each one’s merits don’t necessarily effect the others. After all, these are meant to be the B movies of today, and for my money they’re still better than crap like Transformers or the Matrix sequels. I think they could even extend the franchise with Mutt for some fun 60s styled adventures and i don’t have a problems with that at all.

Man, that’s a lot of writing for no good reason! Check back in a couple of days for my long-awaited follow-up of more unseen Star Wars concepts!

Today’s toys have risen in quality in leaps and bounds over the toys of my youth. The sculpting is better, the molding is better, the packaging…can be better at times, and the articulation is in a whole other league. And for the most part, the painting is better. Well, sometimes, that is. For companies like McFarlane Toys and NECA, the paint applications is just wonderful most of the time. But for most of the mainstream majors, like Hasbro, Playmates, and Mattel (now that Toy Biz is out of the game) it seems like an afterthought.

In the late 90s Toy Biz was really one of the first major players to step up to the plate and deliver very detailed paint applications on their figures and more sophisticated paint washes to bring out the heightened sculpting details. Sure, the smaller guys were also experimenting with paint, but nothing like the leap Toy Biz made (even with their smaller figures), thanks to guys like Eddie Wires doing the paint masters (and also doing them for Palisades and Diamond, among others). For companies like McFarlane and DC Direct you had the Four Horsemen and Tim Bruckner really raising the bar with their painting prowess.

But for some reason, we hadn’t seen this trickle down to Hasbro, Playmates, Bandai or Mattel in their superhero lines. Sure, Mattel is now using some paint washes on the DCUC line, but as the Red Tornado can tell you, this is all still very much a work in progress (and one they are laboring hard to fix, I might add). Actually, the reason is quite clear: money. The time it takes to oversee every aspect of production costs money. The added paint operations cost money. The extra rounds of approvals to hash out a detailed process cost money. And for the big companies, this is not a cost that they want to bear. Which is sad.

Because they work and skill that go into making the toys is being sabotaged at the final step. Most folks think that painting is just slapping on some solid colors that matches the comics. Well, that match a style guide, at least. For some reason, most style guides don’t match the comics or animation very well, so the toys suffer right off the bat. But it’s not just filling in the lines with color. A good paint job can transform a sculpt like you wouldn’t believe, and a bad paint job can really mask the artistry of the sculptor. How many times do we see figures of famous actors and think the sculptor got the details wrong? More times than not, I wager. But it many cases, the sculpt is actually perfect. You just can’t tell because it’s covered in shoddy work.

Here are some really good examples of what paint can do: I found these across the web and I hope you go follow the links back to these artists’ work. It really is amazing. First up is Noel Cruz, who goes by Noeling. He repaints existing dolls as celebrities and original works. He treats each one as a 3D canvas, and what he does with the run of the mill dolls and paint is very good, but what he does with a specifically sculpted doll, like the Tonner ones, is nothing short of phenomenal. The pic to the right is a before and after of the same doll- a Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker. No sculpting is involved. Can you imagine if this was a production piece, even a high end one? Go check out his galleries to be even more amazed. The guy is seriously talented.

But sure, you’re saying. Those are expensive dolls, not production figures at 6 inches. True, true. But smaller figures can always use help, like Hasbro’s IronMonger figure from the new Iron Man movie line. MeguiarsEM on the Spawn Forums took this basically unpainted figure and gave it a quick dry brushed metal look that raises the bar considerably. It went from looking like a toy to a high end collectible. With only an easy paint job!

I haven’t done one of these posts in awhile, but I’ve been rediscovering stuff I’ve been sent over the years that never made it to shelves and thought that it was high time that some of it been seen.

This little piece was sent to me by an anonymous soul who has dropped a few other bombshells on me in the past. It looks like it was going to be sort of a prop of the 70s JLA Satellite Headquarters that would have sculpted details and cutaway sections that lit up from inside like a shadowbox. I have no idea when this was supposed to be made, or how far along it got in the pipeline. I only know that I’ve never heard about it actually being solicited, and neither has Julius Marx. So at this point, I’m guessing it’s dead (I was sent this a year or so ago).

I’ve been a collector for as long as I can remember. When I was around three years old, I collected sticks. Yes, ordinary branches that had fallen from trees, which came in all sorts of varieties and limited editions. After that I picked up stuffed animals whenever I could, the more unusual the critter (plush skunks, possums, hyraxes…) the better. Once 1977 hit, though, my entire collecting focus changed. I think we all know what happened in the summer of 1977. From that moment on, my life became Star Wars- Star Wars cookie jars, Star Wars bedsheets, and of course Kenner Star Wars toys. I even started collecting comics by picking up the adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back and discovering Spider-Man on my trips to the comic shop. Once I hit Jr High School my fascination with toys faded away to be replaced by a fascination with girls. But I never stopped collecting, moving on to books, music, sticks…well, maybe not sticks again. Still, I never ceased to find things that once acquired would somehow turn out to be a collection eventually.

Of course, once I was firmly settled in college the toy bug bit again and has led me down the path of both hobby and career, with a little web pioneering thrown in along the way. And so it has gone over the past 10 years; it doesn’t take me long after dropping one collection to gain another one just as quickly. Since entering the promotional premium field I have been acutely interested in Advertising Icons. These are the mascots and slogan bearers of major companies past and present, who have entered the pop culture zeitgeist throughout the decades since the concept first gained traction in the 1930s. Thanks to the wonder of eBay it has become much easier to track down various advertising merchandise made to promote specific businesses, which was great since I wanted a collection for my office only- a collection that others in my field could appreciate a bit more than the usual Spawn figures in every artist’s cubeicle. The problem with collecting these is that with the vast differences in scale, material and quality between pieces is that it never quite felt like a coherent collection. And anyone who knows me knows that I value consistency above nearly all other factors in my collections. One look at the picture on the left will show you the depth of this problem that I faced. (As always, click on each image for a larger view.)

This all changed in 2001 when I happened into a collectible mall in Anaheim, CA. That’s when I saw a bobblehead of Count Chocula. Count Chocula! The figurehead of all the General Mills monster cereals! I was stunned. Now, let me explain that I was by no means a fan of bobbleheads. Truth be told, given a choice I would almost always choose an action figure or maybe a nice solid vinyl doll over the outsized “head on a spring” figurine. And yet…something inside me was awakened by this chance meeting with the good Count. I bought him without delay, and upon opening my new prize I saw the name Funko. A name that I, as informed as anyone in the toy business, had never heard before. This was going to take a bit of research. Such as going to the Funko.com website! Which I did.

What I found was the answer to all my ad icon collection prayers: a new company whose only mission in life was to bring fun to those who wanted something more out of the collecting experience. OK, maybe that’s getting a bit too grandiose. But it was obvious that these guys were following a different path than most of the other companies out there. A path lined with Wacky Wobblers as far as the eye could see.

Funko was started in 1998 by”Chairman of Fun” Mike Becker, who left his high tech job to pursue the dream of making an instant classic item: a “Wacky Wobbler” that was at once nostalgic and yet made with the latest production techniques for total fidelity to the source material. Using his life savings, Becker pursued a retro favorite license, Bob’s Big Boy, for his first Wacky Wobbler. Exceeding all expectations, the Big Boy Wobbler sold like hotcakes. Funko was off to a great start that only got better as word of mouth spread through the collecting community of this bold new line. Within a few short years Funko was entrenched as both the go-to company for top notch premiums and also the only company around who was willing to bring long neglected characters to life. You can read more about Funko’s history here and here. If it’s not obvious by now, then let me assure you dear reader, I love these things.

Just take a look at some of the pictures on this page. In 4 short years I’ve filled the nooks and crannies of my office with Wacky Wobblers. And not just ad icons at this point; over the years I’ve been suckered into picking up classic cartoon characters, too. Since Funko started making the Wobblers, many other companies have jumped on the bobblehead bandwagon. And while some of them, such as NECA and Bosley Bobbers have done some nice work, in my eyes no one can hold a candle to Funko. Let’s start with character selection. While most companies might go after a master license, and then bleed that license dry with variants, resculpts, and oversaturations, Funko takes a unique tack on acquiring license, usually for single characters only and in limited quantities. This keeps the costs down and allows them to put out up to 5 Wobblers a month in a good year. And the choices they have made so far are astounding (in a good way): who else would have not stopped with the main three General Mills monsters and made Fruit Brute and Yummy Mummy, whose cereals have been off the shelves for decades? When was the last time you saw Banana Splits merchandise? Or Speedy Alka-Seltzer? Funko has also made good use of the Hanna-Barbera license, making not only the given characters like the Flintstone and Jetsons, but mining the depths of my generations’ collective childhood to bring us the likes of Captain Caveman, Jabberjaw, and Squiddly Diddley?

The design and sculpting has been above par also, giving many of these characters the best representation they’ve ever had. And the quality of every Funko product is top notch- I never have had to worry about getting a bad paint job which makes it much easier to order these sight unseen through the many websites that sell them. On a side note, I heartily applaud Funko for going with plastic bobbers instead of the cheaper resin ones that most other companies make. Plastic just makes them feel more like “real” mass manufactured itmes, and helps tie them into the ad icons of years gone by. Too many times in the past I’ve been frustrated with the major toy companies who just don’t get it. Funko “gets it”, big time. As an example, one of the most fun aspects of the line is the packaging. Funko puts the time and effort into the design of these that no other company does; many packages mirror the product’s origin (i.e., Count Chocula’s looks like a cereal box) or otherwise make sense for each character. Yet each box still conforms to a general style and uniform shape, making a “mint in box” collection just as attractive as a loose one! They’ve also engineered a great new plastic insert that holds the Wobbler tightly in place with no chance of deformity in shipping, and without any of those darn twist-ties that collectors have grown to hate.

I have to admit that I’ve been lucky in discovering the line when I did. With most Wobblers limited to roughly 10-20,000 pieces this line sells through much faster than a mass market line would. Part of the reason for that is Mike Becker’s insistences on keeping the company small and dealing only with specialty markets. Which is smart, since a larger distribution base would necessitate much larger sales to cover costs. This way they are able to stay profitable and yet make a wide variety of characters each year. In addition to their basic line, Funko also makes custom Wobblers to anyone who wants them. This has led to some very hard to find Wobblers like the Empire Carpet Guy, Magic the Old Navy Dog, and the Outback Steakhouse Kangaroo. They also make a number of variants from time to time, less as a profit center and more as special items for the fans to hunt down. That Funko is extremely collector friendly has never been more evident than at last year’s San Diego Comic Con where they set up a mini supermarket with over 80 variants available with multiple specialty items for the fan base.

Although this article has focused on the Wacky Wobblers, I thought I should mention that Funko has been branching out over the past couple of years into new categories such as the rotocast hand puppets and Spastik Plastik vinyl figures. Who knows how long they’ll continue to make Wacky Wobblers, but with the wealth of material still out there, I’m hoping it will be for many, many years to come. We’ll be covering the Funko booth at this year’s San Diego Comic Con, so check back in a month or so to scope it out!

You can find these for sale at many online stores and many ebay sellers. The average price is $10 per wobbler, but once they are retired it goes up from there. You can also go hang out with the COF and fans in the forums at Funko Funatics. And here is a good checklist to see everything that Funko has made so far.

Like the previous entry on the BK Lord of the Rings figures, these were pitched to Burger King in 2001 as a tie-in to the then-airing X-Men Evolution cartoon.

The earlier idea of figure packs was such a hit internally, when the X-Men license rolled around it was thought that the perfect “never been done before” concept would be 14 two-packs(!), each containing hero and villain figures. This is the overall “beauty shot” of all the figures together – each figure would have it’s own unique action feature and the pairs would be somewhat appropriate to the characters, i.e. Professor X & Magneto, Wolverine & Sabretooth, etc.

Sadly, the powers that be at Burger King didn’t see the fun in making the “same old figure toys” and instead opted for a rival concept of static figurines that came with an interactive CD. This is something I would see over and over while designing toys; people who didn’t like toys making decisions regardless of kids or collectors or even sales. While Jack in the Box later made a nice set of Justice League figures, this would have been a nice chance to own a lot of the more obscure characters that never saw toy representation.

One note: some of the designs (Boom Boom, Wolfsbane, etc) were based off the comics and not the show due to only a list of names for the upcoming characters was provided to BK and not character art. These would have been corrected had the concept made it to production. Much of the art shown is the work of the great Jeff Parker, Michael Smith, and David Hudnut! For more unseen X-Men Evolution art, go check out designer Steve Gordon’s great website!